Tim Retout's www presence

Telford Ted

I'm thinking of framing this:

Posted: 26 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS

Enscript security patches

I have been taking a closer look at the various security patches Debian applies to GNU Enscript this morning - I believe there may be similar problems lurking in other parts of the codebase, so my plan is to fix these myself this week. This avoids various inconvenient questions about copyright assignment. For the shorter patches this isn't a problem, of course - and there's generally more than one way to fix buffer overflows anyway. There's one longer patch where shell escapes are prevented - that might need more study.

Posted: 25 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, enscript

Fixing Problems

My mum uses a Dell laptop running Ubuntu. Each time I visit I get to fix any problems that have cropped up. To be fair, there weren't that many so far.

• libdvdcss2 was not installed. I explained why, and fixed it.
• DVD menus were not being played in totem-gstreamer - the DVD would autorun, but you could not change to other titles. If you restarted totem with a different menu option you could at least set up a playlist with all the titles. It's a shame, because I like gstreamer, but as a quick fix I installed totem-xine and set it to autorun for DVDs instead.
• Upgraded to Intrepid. Fairly uneventful.
• Installed wine so that horrible non-free heart rate monitor software might possibly run.
• Introduced mum to pidgin.
• There seem to be some problems with sound recording - I started setting up Ekiga, but this is a blocker. Might not have time to fix this.

Posted: 24 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, ubuntu

Holiday

I have a week's break from work.

• I'll be improving the OpenStreetMap coverage of Wooler, hopefully.
• I need to check over some enscript patches, so that I can make a release.
• At the same time, I want to practise using gnus for email more thoroughly.

Posted: 23 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS

Emacs and Epiphany

It turns out to be possible to persuade emacs and epiphany to play nicely together.

Opening URLs in Epiphany from Emacs

Sometimes Emacs presents you with clickable hyperlinks (in info documentation, perhaps).

To customize the browser in which these are opened, I am using the following in .emacs:

(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-generic
      browse-url-generic-program "gnome-open")

There are also specific epiphany-related functions, but I'm using the default gnome program for the moment. This can be configured via the default applications dialog.

Opening text files in Emacs from Epiphany

When you download a text file, or use 'View > Page Source' in the menus, epiphany uses the gnome desktop's handler for the 'text/plain' mime type.

The simplest way of configuring this is to run nautilus, right-click on a text file and choose 'Properties'. Then the 'Open With' tab lets you select an application. Emacs should already be listed, or you can add it if not.

Further ideas

• It might be worth turning on the emacs keybindings in gtk.
• It should be straightforward to write an extension that lets you edit text fields with Emacs.

Posted: 23 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, emacs, epiphany, gnome

Blind *and* stupid

• Went to the optician's and asked about prescription swimming goggles today. Might have to get them made specially - buying cheaper ones with standard spherical lenses would not correct my astigmatism, and leave everything blurry. Still, it would be the difference between being able to read half the eye test chart and not being able to see where the chart is.
• I have an HP dx2250 at both home and work, and HP's BIOS doesn't enable the SVM instructions on the CPU (which would let you do cool things with virtualization). So this could be my excuse to finally use/develop coreboot. Will make a shopping list of tools to flash my BIOS relatively safely.

Posted: 21 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, coreboot

Random

• On Saturday I went to Birmingham for the Friends of the Earth West Midlands regional meeting. We learnt about campaign planning, and got an overview of the main national campaigns for the next year. FoE Birmingham use Edubuntu.
• On Sunday I went swimming again. Not so tiring - still need to get some prescription goggles.
• Today at work we were delivering a PostgreSQL database training course for a company in Leicester. BigG happened to be one of the tutees.

Posted: 19 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, credativ, postgresql, foe, edubuntu

Things I learnt today

• gLabels is a nice and simple app, and works well for making CD labels.
• Swimming appears to exercise completely different muscles to jogging, so is very tiring. I could really use some prescription goggles.
• The usual plural of no is noes.

Posted: 16 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS

O RAILLY

I am not having a good year.

Traditionally, when annoyed, I make extravagant purchases that I may or may not regret later. In this new economic climate, however, I have found a substitute outlet.

Arriving soon at a CPAN mirror near you: Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards 0.01 - an interface to a SOAP API from ATOC. Given a station code, you can obtain the next few arrivals/departures/both.

This is in hacky Perl, but the module should be easy to translate to other languages which have SOAP libraries.

Posted: 08 Jan 2009 00:00 | Tags: Planet WUGLUG, Planet UWCS, nationalrail, perl